A Sudden Drop in Available Hard Drive Space

My Gentoo Linux desktop suddenly went from the usual 138 GB or so of free space to about 65 MB. As I had not downloaded any large files recently to explain such a big loss, I went about hunting for the culprit. A usage of du -sh in various folders eventually found that a Plex log file in "/var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Logs" was taking up all of that space. Apparently some Plex users found this issue with version 0.9.7.9, but I was experiencing it with 0.9.7.17 as well and that it caused some heavy CPU usage as well. I upgraded to 0.9.7.22 using the megacoffee overlay, but I am unable to connect to Plex/Web, even after re-starting Plex. I'll have to see if a reboot of the computer fixes that and if the upgrade fixed this problem.

Working around a print issue with CUPS on Gentoo Linux

After using Sabayon Linux for a while, I have gone back to Gentoo Linux, as Sabayon Linux recently became a bit too unstable for my liking.

I tried setting up my Samsung ML-1430 printer (connecting via USB) in Gentoo, which has never been a problem before.  It detected the printer just fine, but CUPS could not see it.  I searched for an easy solution, but could not find any.

I decided to try following the Gentoo instructions for setting up a printer via CUPS to allow other machines on the network to print to it, but apply those instructions to my Linux Mint laptop, which sees the printer just fine.  Sure enough, Gentoo can see the printer remotely and print to it.

The other nice thing about this solution is that it allows my MacBook Pro to see the printer and print to it.  I tried setting up the printer as a local printer in OS X before, but could not get it to print correctly, due to the drivers missing.

No more Gentoo for me

For now, at least. More odd problems than had been usual in the past had popped up - one of the most annoying being a complaint about use flags for ffmpeg (the app and the virtual version), which would complain even when changing it to what it wanted as well as programs not compiling. An effort to fix it ended up breaking the install, so I have moved to Kubuntu. It's working, though it is quirky in places. Problems I have seen include Flash crashing, Firefox being a bit slow at times, as well as the system freezing when maximizing Konsole. It will have to do for now, as I don't have a lot of time to play with different distributions.

Gentoo.org Blog Posts

Does gentoo.org really need to go crazy with posting as many as 35 blog posts over 17 days? I have no problem with the blog posts themselves, but when you have this many it gets a little difficult to look through each of the headlines and to tell which ones are even new. If they can't limit this to having separate "Blog posts" sections for each week, could they at least put a date added next to each headline?

Drobo in a Linux and Mac Environment

I purchased a Drobo (without Droboshare, the add-on network capability, as I've seen reports of it being slow and the price is a bit much for what it does) with the intent of backing up the music and various documents on my Linux box as well as photos and video that I've taken and have on my Mac. It's very quiet and seems to work well, once I worked through various things to get it working on my Gentoo box. It worked fine on my Kubuntu laptop.

Drobo Dashboard, that software that comes with the Drobo, only works on Windows and OS X, so I installed it on my Mac. Drobo Dashboard only allowed formatting in NTFS, HFS+, and FAT32. EXT3 is only an allowable option with Droboshare, The Drobo website does point out Drobo-Utils, the Linux equivalent of the Drobo Dashboard, which does allow formatting in EXT3, so I installed that on my Kubuntu box and formatted the Drobo (I purchased 2 Western Digital 500 GB drives separately) for 2 TB. While it could go higher, the Drobo website mentions a limit of 2 TB, and I did not want to go beyond something that is known to work fine.

From there, I learned about using MacFUSE and fuse-ext2 on OS X to mount EXT3 partitions. I followed those instructions only to find out that the binary mounts the partition as read-only. Writing to the partition is in beta and would require changing a parameter in the source code and compiling it to get that capability. I really did not want to go that direction, so decided to look at formatting Drobo with HFS+.

I had difficulty getting the drive the mount in Gentoo. I already had HFS+ support compiled in the kernel, but found out that I needed to have advanced partition selection, EFI GUID partition support, and support for Large Block Devices enabled in the kernel. 64 bit apparently already has the Large Block Devices support enabled by default. I just had to enable the other two. Things worked fine after that. I plug in the Drobo and KDE finds it just like it does a flash drive. At this time, however, HFS+ support does not work for sizes greater than 2 TB. That's not an issue for me right now.

Xorg causing keyboards and mice to not work

There was a power outage at my house during the early morning hours of Halloween. My computer was off and I had to turn on my computer again. At the KDE login screen, my keyboard and mouse failed to work.

I went through an interactive bootup and chose not to load kdm, taking me to a regular console, and my keyboard worked just fine. I tried looking for solutions (and missed the correct solution, which I'll get to later), did not find one that worked, and decided to reinstall Gentoo.

I decided to go with a 64 bit installation this time, but still ran across the issue of my keyboard and mouse failing. Finally, I find that Xorg started to use HAL. Putting the line
Option "AutoAddDevices" "false"

in the ServerFlags section of xorg.conf fixed this.

Now to find out how to get my dual monitor setup to work like it did in my old machine, despite using the same xorg.conf (minus the line added above) from my old setup.

Gentoo Linux Not Seeing All CPU Cores

I noticed a couple of days ago that emerge was running slower than usual and that the rest of my system would come to a crawl while trying to do other things. After looking at gkrellm and dmesg, I find that the kernel only activated one CPU, even though I have a quad core system and the kernel has SMP activated, the correct CPU, and the correct number of max CPUs/cores. I'm going to upgrade my kernel now and hope that this fixes the problem.

Update: After upgrading the kernel (and a few recompiles of the kernel), it looks like the problem was not having ACPI support compiled into the kernel. dmesg did show a message saying there is a bug in the BIOS, that it would be using some kind of default hardware profile, and to contact the hardware vendor on the BIOS bug. A search did show someone else who had this problem that apparently had it go away after compiling ACPI into the kernel, which appears to be the case for me.

Gentoo kernel upgrade breaks eth0 interface

I recently upgraded my kernel (mostly due to a recent gcc upgrade) from 2.6.25 to 2.6.27 in Gentoo. When I booted into the new kernel, I received an error of "network interface eth0 does not exist" and to check the kernel to ensure that networking and the driver for the device were enabled.

I was a bit mystified, as things worked just fine in 2.6.25 for my Intel gigabit NIC that comes on the Intel DP965LT. Apparently, it looks like some cards were handled by the e1000 driver until the e1000e driver was considered worthy for production. I switched my driver from e1000 to e1000e, rebooted, and everything was working again.

Dhcpcd 4.0 issue in Gentoo solved

My computer had an issue acquiring an IP address from my router once I had dhcpcd 4.0.2 installed (though this could affect all 4.0 versions). It would reject a given IP address and grab one from some other range and I could not connect to the Internet at all.

I went back to version 3 while I got the issue troubleshooted at the Gentoo Forums.

It looks like the main culprit was /etc/dhcpcd.duid (there was no duid keyword in dhcpcd.conf), so I removed it and everything works again.

K3b not seeing blank CD

K3b is complaining about no media being present, even though I put a blank CD into the drive. Permissions look fine. I tried switching out cdrtools for cdrkit, but it made no difference. A recompile of K3b also made no difference. The Gnome CD Master application also appears to not see it, but that program is not the most user friendly, so I really do not want to try using it. It could also possibly explain why I was not able to burn a label on a Lightscribe CD (a completely different CD than what I am trying now).

Mac OS X sees the blank CD just fine, so I am going to try installing Burn and see how that works, since the normal ways of burning a CD in OS X is not as easy as I would like it.

I'm having these problems in Gentoo and believe it is something going on with the system as opposed to K3b or cdrtools. I have burned CDs in this drive before with no problem (two months ago was the last time, I believe) and it reads audio CDs just fine. I have not tried burned CDs with audio or data on them yet to see if it reads them, though. If anyone finds a solution, let me know.

Update: Burn created an audio CD just fine with the CD. Linux saw the CD and it is now playing in Amarok just fine.

Firefox and NoScript Preferences

I'm trying to get NoScript working in Firefox, but the preferences do not appear match the default preferences that come with the NoScript extension. On top of that, even if I try changing the preferences, the OK button is unresponsive - it doesn't close the window and save my preferences.

I originally thought that this was a result of Gentoo's noscript ebuild, but I'm getting the same thing when loading the extension through the Firefox extension Web site. For now, it looks like I will block javascript with Adblock Plus.

In other news, I now have a Technorati Profile.

Dhcpcd 3.1.5 fix found for Gentoo

A few months ago I reported the issues I was having with dhcpcd in Gentoo. One solution I found shortly after that post suggested that I add the line dhcp_eth0="-I ''" (replacing eth0 with whatever your network interface is) to /etc/conf.d/net, but that did not work.

I have finally found the solution that has dhcpcd 3.1.5 work for me - compiling it with the vram USE flag. I still have the dhcp_eth0 line as shown above in there, but it probably is not needed for this to work.

Dhcpcd 3.1.5 causes problems in Gentoo

Dhcpcd 3.1.5 caused me and at least a couple of other Gentoo users. After a computer freeze forced me to reboot last night, I was unable to connect to the Internet, though I could connect to my router. I was thinking that either this dhcpcd update, a bad network cable, or a NIC gone bad would be the cause; I'm glad the cheapest and easiest thing to fix was the cause! I'll be keeping an eye on the Gentoo forums to see when it looks like things are fixed.

k3b CD burning issue

I've come across an issue where k3b does not see a blank CD-R that I've put in my CD/DVD burner drive. It would just keep repeating that I need to put media into the drive.

I found and translated some French and Italian posts that gave me an idea of what was going on, but I could not repeat the steps they were doing to fix the issue.

I first tried updating k3b to the latest masked package in Gentoo, but it still had the problem. I looked over the change logs for the previous versions that cdrkit compatibility did not come about until version 1, though it did not make a difference to me.

I went back to the stable version of k3b and replaced cdrkit with cdrtools, which I've heard is having some issues in Gentoo. I still got complaints about no media being in the drive, but when I forced it this time. it eventually went about burning a CD. It's not perfect, but at least it is functional. I was worried that there was something wrong with my drive, even though it read burned CDs and DVDs just fine.

Gentoo Firefox Issue Solved?

So far, I would say yes. This Gentoo forum post describes the issue I had while running 64-bit Gentoo and had again with 32-bit Gentoo where an X window (or as described by one poster, unmarked windows) would pop up while using Firefox and Firefox would eventually crash. The Gentoo bug page for this problem shows a solution of compiling Firefox using a +moznopango use flag. I recompiled Firefox with that use flag and have had no problems for 3 days. As a bonus, most of the text in Firefox looks a lot better. I'll be using the +moznopango use flag when compiling the 2.0.0.6 version of Thunderbird and the next version of SeaMonkey.

Dual monitors go!

The "100." version of Nvidia drivers finally went stable for the x86 in Gentoo, which I had to (?) install to get dual monitors working. Thankfully, getting it going went smoothly. Even though my primary monitor is on the right, KDE wanted to start up on the left - I found the settings to have it start back on my primary monitor (now known as monitor 2 in KDE), along with the KDE taskbar. From here, though, it looks like I'll need to configure applications to start on my primary monitor. Eventually I will get Neverwinter Nights installed again, though I suspect it won't start in my primary monitor. I'll have to see what to do about that, but I'll worry about it when I get there.

Gentoo for x86 now installed

I removed my amd64 installation of Gentoo and replaced it with the x86 installation so I wouldn't have to face the Flash issues anymore. I was also experiencing problems with Firefox, with windows mysteriously opening and making navigation difficult. I'm having the problem on the x86 side as well and suspect that one of the add-ons I installed is causing the problem. I'm guessing it may be the NoScript add-on. I'm working with very few add-ons right now and will add more, one at a time, making sure one of these isn't causing the issue, and probably avoiding NoScript unless I find something that suggests something else is the problem.

I'm also waiting to see if I will have issues with X crashing when using Mplayer, but am waiting for a moment when I have nothing critical running.

Problems with Flash continue

Flash has stopped working again, and according to a post on the Gentoo forums, that nspluginwrapper gets stupid from time to time. I'm seriously pondering going back to a 32 bit install. I wouldn't be surprised if 64 bit isn't ready until Windows forces people to 64 bit, which will result in vendors finally going 64 bit.

Mysterious Flash Outage

I noticed yesterday that Flash stopped working for me in Gentoo Linux. I'm guessing it may have been from an update to Firefox version 2.0.0.4, but I thought I would've noticed something like that on Sunday or Monday at the very latest. I simply had to re-emerge netscape-flash and Flash is working once again!

There Are Four Cores

At least, that is what Captain Picard might say about my new computer.

My new computer was built by CyberPower, Inc. and consists of:
Intel Quad Core Q6600 - 2.4 GHz
2 250 GB SATA II 7200 RPM w/ 8 MB cache hard drives
2 GB DDR PC6400 RAM
Intel DP965LT LGA775 motherboard
EVGA Geforce 8500 GT w/ 256 MB RAM (PCI Express)

Along with the case, keyboard, mouse, DVD drive and DVD burner, and other components.

I'm running Gentoo Linux 2007.0 with this, but it was not an easy install - the install CD had a version of the kernel that was one minor version away from recognizing the motherboard. I was surprised with this considering how long the motherboard has been out. I was able to get around this thanks to Small Gentoo that contained a newer kernel that detected the motherboard just fine.

Still, that wasn't the end of the problems. Gentoo has not gone stable yet with a version of Nvidia's drivers that supports the 8500 GT. It's not even available yet through Gentoo. I had to go with an unstable version of the open source Nvidia drivers (which don't provide 3d acceleration) to get X to work. I will eventually go to the closed source Nvidia drivers when it becomes available, as I want the 3d acceleration for games and to take advantage of TwinView so I can have dual monitor support for my Samsung 740 BX and NEC AccuSync LCD 72V.

As a simplistic way of looking at benchmarks for this system compared to my old system (a P4 2.4 GHz 533 MHz bus w/ 1 GB PC333 RAM) and my Mac Powerbook (1.67 GHz PowerPC G4 w/ 1 GB SDRAM), I've used distributed.net's OGR25 contest to see what kind of speed I was getting.

Old system: Approx. 9,000,000 nodes/sec.
Powerbook: Approx. 20,000,000 nodes/sec.
Quad core system: Approx. 35-39,000,000 nodes/sec. - and that is just per core - it works on 4 packets at once.